Sacramentary

The pages of this codex, another manufacture of the Reichenau monastery, recollect the names of six patriarchs from John IV (†1019) to Sigeard (†1077).

The prevailing presence of Bavarian saints lets suppose that the manuscript was originally destined to a centre in south-eastern Germany. The obituary notice referring to the marquis Henry I of Babenberg, who died in 1018, written by the first hand, allows to know also the post quem term for the work manufacturing. After leaving the Bavarian area in the third quarter of the eleventh century, it came to Aquileia, where the obits of six patriarchs were thereon written: John IV (19.VII.1019), Poppo of the Otokars (28. IX.1042), Gotebald (27.XII.1062), Ravengerius (18.II.1068), Sigeard (12.VII.1077). At the beginning of the nineteenth century the Oxford Library purchased it from the Jesuit Matteo Luigi Canonici’s collection.

The decoration of the Sacramentary includes, along with a large number of ornamented initials, incipit pages for the liturgical Preface and the Canon, and four miniatures on the festivities of Christmas, Easter, Ascension and Pentecost. The style of the decoration unmistakably ascribes the manuscript to the production of Reichenau by the Liuthar circle of illuminators and sets it among the works subsequent to the manufacturing of the Pericopes of Henry II (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 4452) and the Bamberg Apocalypse (Staatsbibliothek, Msc. Bibl. 140).

Some pages of the Sacramentary: ff. 30v, (ornamented page with the initials VD); 31v (illuminated page with a Crucifix); 38v (Nativity and Announcement to the Shepherds); 95v (the three Maries approaching the Tomb).